


Kick My Ass and Call It a Date

by sarcasm_for_free



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Arguing, Banter, Bickering, Blind Date, F/M, First Dates, Humor, Misunderstandings, Mixed Martial Arts, POV Jaime Lannister, Past Injury, not more than in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 16:49:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18347723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasm_for_free/pseuds/sarcasm_for_free
Summary: On a first date, you eat, talk, and maybe watch a movie. Youdon’tbeat the tar out of each other.Nobody seemed to have informed Jaime’s date of that.





	Kick My Ass and Call It a Date

**Author's Note:**

> I can’t believe I’m finally posting this baby. I originally started this fic in December 2017, ignored it till November 2018, finished it in December, and then...fell into a deep dark hole called writer’s block (or editor’s block, in this case) *lol*  
> But I had so much fun writing Jaime’s rambling (and slightly sexual, so you’re warned) POV, I can just hope you'll like it too.
> 
> Enjoy :D

Margaery could go suck on a lemon, Jaime thought, or a cock. Whatever least tickled her fancy that day.

Huffing and puffing as if he wanted to impersonate the big bad wolf, ready to blow the little piggy’s house away, Jaime Lannister lay flat on the training mats and imagined all the ways he could throttle Margaery Tyrell come Monday for whatever misinformation she had given his blind date.

When the new chief of the financial department had – at one of their frequent lunch meetings, where they spent more time bitching about the irony of Oberyn Martell holding the firm’s sexual harassment prevention seminar than with eating their salads – mentioned that she knew a woman who could kick the guy’s derriere and _oh, how nice it would be if Jaime and her friend had a chance to meet_ , he’d immediately realized she was trying to play matchmaker.

Jaime’s last serious romantic relationship dated so far back, people had still been ecstatic about the invention of the wheel. Or about merchandising it, since that was what his company did. Being the co-worker slash quasi-friend she was, Margaery thought he and a woman named Brienne Tarth would get along quite nicely. This, as Jaime and every other single person knew, was code for _dating_ , and usually involved spending an evening at a restaurant, coffee shop or cinema.

Nobody seemed to have informed Brienne of that.

“You left your right flank unprotected. Try again!” the mentioned lady hollered from the other side of the fitness room they had rented for two hours. She was sweating as much as Jaime, but had apparently way better lung capacity than him, since she didn’t sound like a fairytale animal and was still able to scream at him.

Jaime gingerly touched the abused right side of his stomach, where the blond colossus impersonating a female 23-year-old literature student had battered him with her elbow.

Running a business was time-consuming, but he should really get back into the groove and train more, because this was just humiliating. He’d once won the National Championship in Mixed Martial Arts, for heaven’s sake! Okay, that was 5 years ago, before he had started working in marketing, and he did have good reasons to stop, but, _come on_.

Black and blue, wheezing like the old man he sincerely hoped he wasn’t becoming, and in sports wear so soaked through it was almost translucent, he pondered that this was still far off from being the worst date he had ever been on. (If you counted tumbling your sister – now business rival – in your wine cellar, so nobody would find out about your affair, as a date. He’d got spider bites on his buttocks for that. _Spider bites_. On his _ass._ )

But Brienne was, when she wasn’t occupied with kicking him around the room, or even because of that, rather intriguing. Overly large, freckled and dour looking she may be, but the snippets of conversation he could get out of her led him to believe that she was an intelligent, if not as quick-witted as him (which nobody was, so she may be forgiven), young woman with a sense of humor so dry she wasn’t even aware she possessed it. And with the way he was reacting to every hit she landed and the scent of her perspiration, he also discovered a few new kinks of his. Would you look at that.

Brienne’s red face appeared above his prone form. She seemed concerned. “You’re not getting up. Are you okay? Did you dislocate or pull anything?” she asked before holding out her hand to him.

Add _kind_ and _the bluest eyes ever_ to the list of things Jaime knew about Brienne Tarth.

Whilst he ignored the proffered hand and got up – he still had his pride, thanks a lot – Brienne carried on, “We shouldn’t have started with a real match. You’re out of training for what, two decades?”

The. Hell.

New items for the Brienne Tarth list: _insolent_ and _bad at math_.

Affronted, Jaime pouted his way over to the bench near the door.

The second his body hit the seating, the familiar twinge in his right hand became more noticeable, now that he wasn’t concentrating on dodging Brienne’s limbs. Maybe she wasn’t so far off with her assessment of his age, creaky bones and all. The injury that had cost him his career in sports hadn’t acted up this much since his last round of physiotherapy, directly after winning his Championship title and crashing his car into a fallen tree on his way home.

He rested his head on the wall behind him and studied the sweaty mess of sass in front of him. A break wouldn’t go amiss, and if their combined odor was anything to go by, the same went for a shower. His parched mouth said break first, so he pulled his sports bag closer and started in on the small talk to signal his wish for a cease-fire. His right hip needed the reprieve as much as his hand and lungs, though he’d rather scream wolf and run away than admit it.

“Interesting first date, I have to give you that.”

Her whole body went rigid, her head half-turned to him. “What?”

“The gym is a pretty unconventional location for a date. But then, I wouldn’t have seen you in action if we had merely dined at some bistro. Though it makes me wonder what tales good old Marge told you that made you decide you wanted to pummel a guy you’ve never met before into the ground,” he grinned up at her.

“What are you talking about?” She asked the question with so much repressed fury that he finally caught on to the fact she probably wasn’t playing coy and stopped in the middle of pulling down his bag’s zipper.

“The date Margaery set us up on? This one,” Jaime vaguely gesticulated with his left hand at the room at large.

Her face hardened in response, the crinkle between her brows getting more pronounced. “I’m not amused by such jokes.”

Now she had lost him. “What do you think we’re doing here?”

When she continued to look constipated, he asked further, “What exactly did Margaery tell you?”

His genuine confusion must have been plain to see, because Brienne deflated surprisingly fast. She swayed from one foot to the other and back, an endearingly childish show of insecurity, and began to worry the corner of her lower lip between her teeth, completing the innocent display.

“That she works with you, that she dropped my name in one of your talks, and we should meet up because we have something in common,” Brienne pressed out between barely moving lips.

Jaime rolled his eyes. “Yeah, being single.”

“No – what? No!” she sputtered. “Martial arts, that’s what she meant.”

After looking for a few seconds at his _Are you serious?_ -expression, she followed it up with a meek, “I think,” coupled with a strangely adorable scrunchy face.

For the first time, Jaime was overwhelmed by her youth and naivety, not hampered by her horse power and right hook. He finally fished his water bottle out of his now open bag to do something else than stare at her like she was a fascinating new exhibit at the zoo.

Taking a long awaited sip, he swallowed and asked, “Then why did you even come if you thought I was just a stranger who wanted to fight you? You have to admit, two strangers getting thrown together by a mutual friend just to punch each other would be straight-up weird.”

“Not weirder than the concept of two strangers getting thrown together to suddenly date each other,” she shot back, the quotation marks audible.

He couldn’t fault her logic. Blind dates were the invention of the devil. Usually.

“Okay, but that still doesn’t answer my question. That hard up for sparring partners?”

He could tell from her gaze alone she now seemed to regard him as the class idiot.

“You are a previous National Champion.” He had the feeling she squashed the impulse to finish the sentence with ‘duh’. And he probably would have deserved it. Jaime could still remember a time, so long ago, when he had jumped at the chance to spar with World Champion Arthur Dayne and had fangirled all over the poor man.

Brienne definitely wasn’t fangirling over him. But fighting against (and utterly trouncing) a man who had won one of the shiniest trophies there were for mixed martial arts? That seemed right up her alley.

“Makes sense. Well, it will be a lovely story for our first anniversary.” Yeah, he was needling her, but the flush overlaying the residual post-workout redness of her face was irresistible. Blotchy had never been this cute before.

“What anniversary? There’s nothing to anniverse!” Aw, English was deserting her.

Putting his water bottle back where it had come from, Jaime let his grin grow. He was sure he looked deranged.

“The anniversary of our first date, of course.”

“But this wasn’t a date! Both people need to know that it’s a date to be one!”

She had him there.

Well, that was easy enough to rectify.

He grabbed the straps of his bag and swung it and himself up, putting the satchel over his shoulder. “Okay, then let’s go.”

Blindsided, but not one bit less lovely cherry-red, she was clearly too confused by his behavior to ask anything else than, “Where?”

“To our _official_ first date. You said it yourself. All people involved need to be aware it’s one. Now that I wised you up to the fact,” – here she grunted –, “we both know, and there’s a nice café on the other side of the street. I heard they serve great bear claws.”

Naturally, she had to complicate it.

“Wait a second. Why would we do that?”

Jaime leant back, stretching his neck to peer up at her, which put him still a tad lower than at eve level with her but gave him what he hoped was that charming insufferable flirt look his brother Tyrion always begrudged him. (“You do it and look like you want to eat her panties. I do it and people ask if they can get me something from the highest shelf.”)

“Because we should have been already on a date, just ask Margaery,” he declared.

For the fraction of a moment the horror of having to tell Margaery that she had bailed flashed over Brienne’s face.

All in his favor, so he went on. “And just look how much fun we had so far!” The bruises and bumps on his body begged to differ, but who said he didn’t like a rougher grip from time to time. How many more new kinks he was going to discover in her presence was something he was eager to find out.

“ _And_ I think we can safely say that there’s attraction.” Nobody could look at his sweat-slicked body and not think him hot stuff, he had been told on numerous occasions, and the perspiration rings under Brienne’s arms had their own charm.

She threw her arms out in a wide arc. “When you first walked in here, you thought I was the maintenance guy!”

“In my defense, I only saw you from behind and your choice of workout clothes didn’t help.” A loose pair of long track pants and an, even for her, oversized high-necked t-shirt didn’t inspire him to think of them as date attire.

“Except for the butt. That part of your trousers fits snuggly.” Jaime craned his neck to look around her hip.

“Yes, the butt should have tipped me off.” It was quite a perfect exemplar of the female gluteus maximus.

The squeak she let out was delightful but only half as much as the instinctual whack she gave his upper arm with the back of her hand. Perhaps he truly had a tiny – miniscule, really – masochistic streak. Or he was merely a fan of gut reactions, following them himself and eliciting them in others, and hers were entertaining beyond belief. God, he was addicted to them.

“So, what about that date?”

“Not convincing, try another one,” she huffed, but the blush continued to stain her cheeks, swallowing every freckle.

He had to concede she didn’t have anything in common with the girls he’d dated in his youth, though her reaction seemed a bit harsh. He didn’t want to know how this kind of interaction usually went for Brienne, so sincerity seemed like the most promising way to proceed.                                                                                                     

“I really, really want to talk to you about fighting techniques and sex jokes in medieval literature while we share a bear claw. Honestly, this is the best date I’ve been on in forever.”

“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? I think we already agreed this doesn’t count,” she said, her good humor coming back in spades. 1:0 for sincerity.

Jaime grabbed the offered olive branch with both hands and shouldered the door behind him open. “Then let’s save time and get started,” he grinned.

The last vestige of bashfulness reared its head and got Brienne to rock to and fro on the spot. She chewed once more on her lip, leaving behind all these darling teeth marks on the dry skin.

Her eyes became searching. “Could we still come back later to resume our match?”

Charmed, Jaime laughed and nodded. At least she had her priorities straight.

“Yes, we can do that. I even demand it. We still have to see who’ll come out on top, after all.”

The corners of her mouth twitched and she pushed past him out of the doorway. “Dream on. I already sent you flying.”

“Please, only because I was holding back. You’re a novice. I just wanted to give you a fighting chance. In the main round, I’d have flattened you,” Jaime called as he hurried after her.

Bear claw, here they come.

**Author's Note:**

> What can I say, I’m a sucker for banter, first meetings, and weird humor :P  
> And for comments, kudos, bookmarks, and subscriptions! ;)


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